Friday, 10 August 2012

Ha ha oh

At school everyone used to say, "Purple is the colour of sexual frustration. You are wearing purple, therefore you are sexually frustrated. Let us all laugh at a plight we will only ever come to understand twenty years into a chaste, joyless marriage we are keeping together for the sake of our kids. Ha ha oh."

My weird prose-poem-science-fiction novella, Holophin, is being published by Penned in the Margins on September 1st in a delightful hardback ltd edition. This isn't like those Kinder Surprise Teeny Terrapins ltd editions, which were limited to 1.6 billion per continent. This is a ltd edition of 300. And the 2nd edition will be GREY instead of purple, so everyone will know you are a slacker who couldn't get out of bed in time to catch the first edition, even though it took over a decade to sell out. But some time later it will be available as an E-Book, for those of you who enjoy dropping electronic devices on your upturned faces at night. Here is the catalogue blurb:

It is 2031 and the must-have gadget is the Holophin: a tiny,
dolphin-shaped microprocessor which cures your worst impulses and
phobias, comforts you in your grief or boredom and makes everything look
much, much prettier.

Hatsuka and Max are students at the Takin
International School, a learning institute so magnificent it produces
Holophins as a by-product of its own projects. The billionth device has
just been sold, but when Takin’s best students are stalked by a shady
rival manufacturer, Holophin’s monopoly, and the narrative itself,
begins to unravel – with unexpected consequences.

This
hallucinatory and darkly funny sci-fi mystery is the debut novella by
acclaimed poet Luke Kennard, a refracted meditation on identity,
technology and the imagination.

So there. I always threatened to write a sci-fi story and now I have. There will be a big trendy London launch party where people have METAL HAIR and PHILANTHROPIC IDEAS directly proportional to their PRIVATE INCOMES and I highly recommend you attend. This will be on September 8th in the place where they film Dragons' Den - that great show about dragons who have a party but none of the other dragons turn up so they have to build a pirate ship and fire moonbeams in the dragons' eyes to make them bewitched and then they come to the party and the first dragons say aha! and breathe fire on them and make them into burnt dragons. I'll confirm.

In other news The Necropolis Boat was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their Autumn (I think - maybe Summer) Pamphlet Choice. This is an extraordinary turn of events and has caused me to rethink its position in my oeuvre, i.e. it is now the best thing I have ever written.